Specifying Secure Transport Channels

Security architectures often make use of secure transport protocols to protect network messages: the transport protocols provide secure channels between hosts. In this paper we present a hierarchy of specifications for secure channels. We give trace specifications capturing a number of different confidentiality and authentication properties that secure channels might satisfy, and compare their strengths. We use the various modes of TLS as a running example, and we give examples of single-message protocols that we believe satisfy the channel specifications.